By Armond White

The Kite Runner
Directed by Marc Forster


Marc Forster makes message movies (Monster’s Ball, Stranger Than Fiction, Stay) yet he’s never dissed like Stanley Kramer, whose socially conscious ’50s and ’60s films are now considered corny. Forster’s messages get cachet because they always come with kinkiness. The Kite Runner, based on the bestseller novel by Khaled Hosseini, pushes those Forster buttons: political fear and sexual panic. Its story concerns Islamic extremism as experienced by an immigrant-American novelist, Amir (Khalid Abdalla) living the literary life with his wife in San Francisco, but internally is escaping his Afghanistan childhood until forced to relive painful memories of his own repression.

Flashback to pre-teen Amir: the son of a middle class intellectual and political activist, Baba (the imperious Homayon Ershadi) who spoke out against the Taliban and the invading Soviet Communists. Little Amir’s friendship with the servant boy Hassan becomes a casualty of the Taliban revolution. That’s heartbreaking enough, but it wouldn’t be a Marc Forster film if this boyhood idyll was unerotic; there are hints of pubescent androgynous attraction in the way Amir and Hassan pledge devotion, read stories under a pomegranate tree and team-up to fly kites in a local competition. While The Kite Runner rehashes the Taliban’s cruelty for Westerners who forgot, it also touches on the homoeroticism latent in both male friendship and totalitarian regimes.

The actor Khalid Abdalla plays adult Amir with gentle eyes and a mild manner, still haunted by his father’s lament: “There’s something missing in that boy.” When returning to Afghanistan, then Pakistan, to find the boyhood friend he betrayed, Amir is confronted with masculine totalitarianism: He must cover his smooth face with a beard; gets patted-down by a guard and laughed at as “soft;” and witnesses a sharia, the public ritual of a woman being stoned in a stadium full of disapproving men.
The Kite Runner enlarges its friendship theme to confront the terror of machismo.

Amir’s physical cowardice contrasts Hassan’s moral/spiritual courage and loyalty. As boys, they both thrilled to the imported American movie, The Magnificent Seven (identifying with either Steve McQueen or Charles Bronson). Western courage inspires adult Amir’s reaction to the appalling instances of terrorism, sexual abuse and ethnic prejudice that invades his family. This specter of gay panic vies with the threat of fascism as The Kite Runner’s major theme.

Forster’s titillating approach keeps the story provocative rather than complex. Politics aside, it recalls sexual and political themes in Vincente Minnelli’s great 1960 melodrama Home from the Hill. But Forster’s mix of topicality and sensationalism makes The Kite Runner sentimental, not profound.